24 January 2015

In an act of extraordinary contempt for both the public and democracy, four lords are attempting to insert the bulk of the Snooper's Charter in the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill in a way that means there will be almost no opportunity to debate it. We have only two days to stop this disgraceful move by writing to members of the House of Lords, and asking them to object to this disturbing attempt to circumvent the proper procedures "because terrorism".

WriteToThem will provide you with a random person to contact, and an easy way to do so - you just have to provide the message. Here's what I've sent to a few people there:

I hope you will forgive me for
contacting you out of the blue like this, but I feel that the
circumstances surrounding the attempt to introduce what amounts to an
entire additional bill into the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill without scrutiny is a gross
abuse of Parliamentary procedure - indeed an assault on democracy.

As the Open Rights Group notes:

"The draft Communications Data
Bill, which is inserted by the amendment in nearly identitical form,
was scrutinised by a joint committee of the Lords and Commons for a
year.

The Committee agreed unanimously that
the draft was inappropriate. None of their concerns are addressed in
the clauses presented.

The report is extremely critical of the
Home Office, labelling their figures “fanciful and misleading.”
It adds that they “expect the overall cost to the taxpayer over the
next decade to exceed £1.8 billion [the Home Office's estimated
cost] by a considerable margin"

The Committee said that “the draft
Bill pays insufficient attention to the duty to respect the right to
privacy, and goes much further than it need or should for the purpose
of providing necessary and justifiable official access to
communications data.”

Their concerns over wholesale
collection and analysis of data were substantial and from any
perspective would need considerable changes to be made to the draft
bill, now presented as amendment to the Counter Terrorism and
Security Bill."

Given those issues, as well as the more
fundamental one of the entire legislative process being abused in
this way, I would like to urge you to attend the debate on Monday and
to express your concerns about this attempt to insert legislation into an
existing Bill at the last minute.

19 January 2015

I will soon have some spare slots in my
freelance writing schedule for regular weekly or monthly work. Below are the main topics that I've been covering, some for two decades.
Any commissioning editors interested in talking about them or related
areas, please contact me at glyn.moody@gmail.com (PGP available).

The greatest threats to openness comes from its
converse: intellectual monopolies. This fact has led me to write
many articles about copyright, patents and trade secrets, mainly for Techdirt.

Trade Agreements - TTIP, TPP, TISA

Because intellectual monopolies
represent such a threat to free software and open projects, I began
writing about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) which dealt with them. In
fact, I wrote a whole series of articles charting ACTA's rise - and fall.

That, in its turn, led me to write about the even more
problematic Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on
an even larger scale: to date, I've written some 48 posts about it for Computerworld UK, and many more for Techdirt. Parallel to this,
I've written extensively about other trade agreements: the
Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) and the Trade in Services
Agreement (TISA).

Surveillance, Encryption, Privacy,
Freedom of Speech

Partly in response to recent revelations by
Edward Snowden, and the growing threat to digital rights that they reveal, I have
written extensively on surveillance, encryption, privacy and freedom of speech, both for Techdirt and Computerworld UK.

Twitter, identi.ca, Google+

Although the number of people who
follow me on Twitter, identi.ca and Google+ is not particularly large
- around 25,000 altogether - natural selection over the years has
ensured that they are highly interested in the topics mentioned above
(otherwise they wouldn't still be following me.) They include some
very active users that re-tweet widely links to my freelance
work.

Europe

As
a glance at my posts to Twitter, identi.ca and Google+ will indicate, I
read news sources in a number of languages (Italian, German, French,
Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Greek, Swedish in descending order
of capability.) This means I can offer a fully European perspective
on any of the topics above - something that may be of interest to
publications wishing to provide global coverage that goes beyond purely
anglophone reporting.

14 January 2015

One of the many big problems with TTIP
is the lack of democracy: it is being negotiated behind closed doors,
with virtually no input from the public. The texts will be made available once
the negotiations are complete, at which point it will not be possible
to make changes. Even the national parliaments will be limited to a
simple yes or no vote.

The MP Geraint Davies has put forward a
motion on TTIP calling for more scrutiny:

"That this House resolves that
the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and any associated
Investor State Dispute Settlement provisions should be subject to
Parliamentary scrutiny in the European Parliament and the UK
Parliament."

It's not much, but it's better than
what we currently have, so I would like to urge you to write to your
local MP, asking them to support this motion. You can do that either
using WriteToThem, or more simply using the 38 Degrees site. Here's
what I've written:

As you know, the Transatlantic Trade
and Investment Partnership (TTIP) currently being negotiated between
the EU and the US is highly contentious. One of its biggest problems
is the lack of scrutiny. In order to inject a little more democracy
into the process - and to bolster your own key role as representative
of the public here - I would like to urge you to support the motion
being put forward by Geraint Davies that calls for more scrutiny for
TTIP.

About Me

I have been a technology journalist and consultant for 30 years, covering
the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995.

One early feature I wrote was for Wired in 1997:
The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was.
My most recent books are Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, and Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business.